Saturday, December 27, 2014

Charles wanted us to watch a movie together last night — something we
hadn’t done in a week! — and I picked out Ender’s Game, a 2013 film of Orson Scott Card’s militaristic
sci-fi novel from 1985. The novel had been kicked around various studios with
several more or less serious attempts to pull it together as a project,
including one Card himself tried to produce in 1996, but it ended up at Summit
Entertainment around the time Summit was absorbed by Lionsgate. (Originally they
called the company “Lions Gate” — two words but with no apostrophe either
before or after the “s” in “Lions,” which irritated me — but now they’re pretty
much just using the one-word spelling and seem to have abandoned their
once-cool logo showing a gate with lions on both doors being pulled into place
with Metropolis-esque machinery.)
One could see why that company would be attracted to this material — they’re
already knocking on the door of major studio status with the immense profits
from the Twilight and Hunger
Games cycles, and the Ender sequence (Card has written five novels in this
universe, including one called Ender’s Shadow that covers the same events as Ender’s
Game from different points of view and was
supposedly tapped for the screenplay of this film since Card felt Ender’s
Game was unfilmable come scritto since it all took place in Ender’s head) offers some
of the same elements: a science-fiction or fantasy setting, a young-adult
protagonist (the actor playing him, Asa Butterfield, was 15 when the film was
shot) and enough material from the original author that they would be able to
make sequelae if the first film was a hit. It wasn’t, however — according to
imdb.com the estimated budget was $110 million and the total gross was
$61,656,849 as of January 3, 2014 — and it’s easy enough to understand why: the
protagonist is a young man instead of a young woman, there are no sexual or
romantic relationships in the story at all (lead character Ender Wiggins’ best
friend and closest ally during the training is a woman, Petra Arkanian, played
by Hailee Steinfeld, but there’s no hint of either an actual or potential
romantic or sexual interest between them the way there is between Tris and her commander, Four, in Veronica
Roth’s Divergent, a story whose author
has acknowledged her debt to Ender’s Game), and the whole mind-set is very male-oriented even though Card, to
his credit, posits a future in which men and women serve in the armed forces on
an equal basis (though, curiously, of the cadets the young Ender trains with
only a few are female, and all but one of the women wash out early on and are
never seen nor heard from again).

The film drew opposition and the threat of a
boycott from Queer community activists because of Card’s writings against homosexuality
in general and same-sex marriage in particular (he’s a lifelong Mormon and a
great-great-grandson of Brigham Young, though given how many wives Brigham
Young had there are probably a lot
of his great-great-grandchildren running around!), and when the Los
Angeles Times ran a commentary denouncing
the boycott threats I wrote a letter (unpublished) in response which said, “I
won’t be joining a call to boycott Ender’s Game, but I won’t be paying money to see it either. Orson
Scott Card’s anti-Gay prejudices don’t bother me as much as the Right-wing
elements of his politics that are part of his story (I’ve read
the book): the virtual worship of the military and the quasi-fascistic
glorification of toughness and mercilessness as not only necessities but virtues.
Card’s power as a writer in expressing his brutal world-view only makes Ender’s
Game more obnoxious that it would be if a
less talented storyteller had published it.” I also suspect Ender’s
Game was a box-office flop because it was
made about a decade too late for the Zeitgeist: the book’s central premise — that 50 years before
it takes place the Earth was attacked and humanity nearly annihilated in a
surprise attack by a species from another planet called the Formics, so called
because they were basically giant sentient ants (formic acid is the chemical
ants emit that was used so famously in the film Them!, also about an attack on humanity by giant ants, in
which a young girl who survived one of the first ant attacks is given a vial of
formic acid to sniff, and she recoils in panic and shrieks, “Them!”) who had
overrun their home planet’s resources and were looking for a new world to
conquer and occupy. According to the plot, Earth survived and drove off the
Formics’ attack, but only barely and through the courage of a commander named
Mazer Rackham (Ben Kingsley), who sacrificed his own life in a suicide attack
that destroyed the Formics’ mothership and caused them to retreat and bide
their time waiting for another shot at Earth. The early dialogue depicting the
Formics as an implacable enemy that needed to be defeated in a pre-emptive war
on their home planet sounds very
much like what President George W. Bush and his staffers were saying to justify
their attack on Iraq (though with the significant difference that at least the
people in the story, unlike the Bush administration, were targeting the actual
enemy that had launched the attack they were responding to, not a country of
people with similar ethnicity to the 9/11 attackers but otherwise nothing to do
with them!).

In the half-century since the last Formic attack, the nations of
the world have come together to create the International Fleet to organize a
worldwide campaign to prepare for the next one and resist it with less loss of
(human) life than the “millions of innocent people” we’re repeatedly told died
in the last one. They’ve also decided to recruit children (at least they did in
the book — in the movie the actors look more like young teenagers and the fact
that the cast members are just hitting puberty makes the sexlessness of the
original material harder to take on screen) because, as Ender Wiggin (Asa
Butterfield), the kid who will rise to leadership despite all the privations
the leaders of the training camp can think of, expresses it in an opening
voiceover, “The International Fleet decided that the world’s smartest children
are the planet’s best hope. Raised on war games, their decisions are intuitive,
decisive, fearless. I am one of those recruits.” Ender’s father and brother
Peter (Jimmy “Jax” Pinchak) both washed out of the training but Ender is the
great white hope of the two people currently in charge of it, Col. Graff
(Harrison Ford, whose casting here only accentuates the already strong Star
Wars parallels in the material) and his assistant,
Major Gwen Anderson (Viola Davis, a strong actress believable in a multiplicity
of roles who hasn’t become a major star only because it’s hard enough to cast
middle-aged white women, let
alone middle-aged Black ones!), who are spying on all the trainees as they go
through their rituals looking for the One who can command the fleet
successfully if and when the Formics attack. The training takes place in a
giant room on board a space station which is supposed to be in zero gravity
(according to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, the actors did their own stunt work
and were trained by Cirque du Soleil performers to look convincing doing the
wire work necessary for them to look weightless on screen), though the script
(written by Gavin Hood, who also directed) pretty much ignores the hint it
drops early on that in zero gravity there is no “up” or “down” — perhaps
because on a movie screen there are very well defined ups and downs and
director Hood and whoever helped him stage this action can’t help but follow
them.

I had imagined Ender being 12 instead of 14 (at an age where that
two-year difference matters) and I had imagined the room being far more
circular and less full of objects, but the basics of the story are pretty much
the same: Ender prevails throughout the training and survives not only the
physical and mental hazards but also the deliberate traps set for him by Graff
and Anderson (and the third authority figure, drill sergeant Dap [Nonso
Anozie], who’s essentially a Black version of the R. Lee Ermey character from
Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket),
who want him deliberately kept miserable and isolated from the rest of the
trainees so he will be forced to stand out all the more by comparison. This
involves turning the other trainees against him so he’ll be bullied and thereby
show whether or not he has the “right stuff” to take it. Eventually Ender and
his crew get to enter the last level of training, a series of increasingly
elaborate computer-simulated war games to prepare them for an attack on the
Formics’ home planet — only, in Card’s big surprise ending that just about
anybody who’s read the book vividly remembers, these aren’t simulations: Ender and his crew, unbeknownst to
them, are leading the International Fleet’s forces in a real pre-emptive attack on the Formics’ planet which ends
in its annihilation and the deaths of virtually all the Formics in a genocidal
bloodbath. On paper this is an unalloyed triumph for the human race which we’re
clearly meant to take as a morally unambiguous victory for the good guys, but
on screen this is followed by a 15-minute postlude in which Ender travels to
another planet, finds a dying Formic watching over an egg that’s supposed to
hatch another colony — including a queen (the gimmick is that, like terrestrial
ants, individual Formics other
than the queen have no free will at all and simply follow her direction — which
was how Ender figured out how to destroy the Formics in the first place; kill
the queens and the others will die because there will literally be no one telling them via telepathy how to
function) — and his guilt feelings over presiding over the destruction of an
entire planet and his population lead Ender to take the queen egg and ensure it
hatches so the Formic race will be preserved and hopefully there can be a modus
vivendi between it and us.

Also in the
character mix is the winner of the last Formic War, Mazer Rackham — they
weren’t going to get an actor of the prestige (and pay) of Ben Kingsley just to
be a few grainy-looking flashback in footage supposedly representing old videos
— who turns up heavily tattooed on his face (he’s supposed to be a Maori from
New Zealand and this is his traditional appearance) and it’s explained that he
merely faked his own death 50
years earlier. (In the book he is
dead, but appears to Ender via Einsteinian tinkering with space and time.)
Mazer is there basically because if you’re going to rip off Star Wars you need a Yoda — that’s also what Leonard Nimoy is
doing in the current run of Star Trek movies, interacting on the same plane with his younger self played by
Zachary Quinto — and Ender’s Game
on film comes off as Star Wars
meets Tom Brown’s School Days
(the 19th century novel that became the prototype for all stories
about kids at a new school who come in wearing their precociousness on their
sleeves, and the existing bullies who try to knock it off) meets The
Truman Show meets just about every quest
legend from Moses to Arthur to Frodo Baggins to (dare I say it?) Luke Skywalker
involving the young, naïve boy who gets caught up in a series of events that
charge him with nothing less than saving his people from some dire human or
natural (or both) calamity. Like the book, it’s great entertainment if you
don’t think too deeply about what it’s about and what Card’s overall message is
— which, though softened by that ending sequence (I’m sure a lot of Right-wing
sci-fi fans who lovedEnder’s
Game for the same thing about it that
bothered me when I read the book — the glorification of militarism and machismo not only as necessary elements of a response to an
existential threat but as values in themselves, as the most true, beautiful and
righteous way a person can live — watched the tacked-on ending of the film and
thought, “Ah, Liberal Hollywood strikes again!”), is that the military virtues
are timeless absolutes and need to be protected from piss-ant political leaders
who want to question or squander them.

I liked the movie for what it was —
ignore the broader issues of what it’s about and the quasi-fascistic world view
Orson Scott Card clearly intended the reader/viewer to accept, and it’s a fun
space-opera shoot-’em-up with an intriguing central character and surprisingly
little on-screen violence. One problem with the film is the sheer weight of the
computer-generated imagery; so much of it is CGI that the high-tech spaceships
both sides are flying look an awful lot like each other and it’s hard even to
tell who is who, much less whom to root for. Still, it’s well acted — Asa
Butterfield is absolutely haunting and nails his transition from scared little
kid to experienced battlefield commander to guilt-ridden recluse (just this
afternoon I watched some of Lawrence of Arabia on TCM and mentally added that film to the many ones
which have influenced Ender’s Game
since it, too, was about a man who led a battle group that won a war against
all odds and then was wracked by doubts as to whether he really did the right
thing) and more than holds his own against old pros like Harrison Ford (no
stranger to science fiction with the three original Star Wars movies and Blade Runner on his résumé!), Ben Kingsley and Viola Davis. It’s
a good movie but, even with Gavin Hood’s “soft” ending (Orson Scott Card is
listed as a producer but that was apparently just a “courtesy title” and he had
little or nothing to do with the film other than creating the original novel
and selling the rights to it), it’s still an ardently pro-military film which
communicates a quasi-fascistic view of the world. It would probably have been a
major hit if it had been made and released in the first year or two after 9/11,
but the Zeitgeist has moved on
and that — as well as the lack of a romance between Ender and Petra to appeal
to the young-adult female
audience that largely powered the success of the Twilight and Hunger Games cycles in print and on film — is probably why it
flopped.